Last Days Of Silence
by aliwildgoose
Summary: You make the best of the time you have. Mai/Zuko, set during "The Boiling Rock"


oOoOo

"Mai, I never wanted to hurt you. But I have to do this to save my country."

"Save it? You're _betraying_ your country!"

"That's now how I see it."

Mai bit back the first retort that came to mind, knowing he'd only take it to heart. She was angry, but not recklessly so. She paced the small, metal room with her hands in her sleeves, her fingers counting the darts bound to each wrist. The guard her uncle had assigned her watched from the walkway outside, peering at her through narrow slits in his helmet. She glowered at him irritably. This wasn't a show for his benefit.

"Don't let anyone in," she said.

The guard's curiosity shifted to dismay. "But the warden-"

"Would tell you to follow my orders." She cut off further protests by slamming the door in his face.

She turned again to Zuko, who sat with his hands twisted together in his lap. His face was as neutral as he ever managed to make it, but she could tell he'd been _looking_ at her again. It was inconvenient, really, how relentlessly endearing he could be. Especially now.

"He'll kill you this time," she said, and the last of traces of his smile fell away.

"He already tried," said Zuko, a little proud.

"Then he'll have Azula kill you for him," Mai snapped. "This is _treason_ Zuko."

"Against a Fire Lord who doesn't deserve his throne. If he-"

"Shut _up_!" Mai stalked over to him, grabbed the front of his tattered uniform and dragged him stumbling to his feet and across the room. She slammed him into the corner beside the door with more force that was probably needed, guiltily enjoying the bang of his head against the wall.

Zuko opened his mouth to protest this treatment, but she silenced him with a look. "We're in a Fire Nation _prison_," she hissed. "You can't just say whatever the hell you want to. My uncle's been warden for twenty years. I know what they do to traitors here. They've only spared you until now because you're royalty." She leaned closer. "Don't push them."

He turned his face toward the wall. "I don't know what's stopping them," he said. "It's not like I'm actually royalty anymore. Not to them. Or to him." He swallowed. "Or to you."

Mai's frown deepened. "You know I don't care about that."

"I know."

Her grip on his shirt relaxed somewhat. She let herself lean imperceptibly forward, until she could feel the heat of his body through her clothes. "You could still come back," she said.

"I can't. Not after what I did."

Mai bit her lip. She'd spent so many hours thinking about this, weighing the options still left to him. Now that he was here, in front of her, instead of a letter clenched in her fist, she wasn't sure how to start. "He still wants the Avatar," she said finally, hoping that was enough.

Zuko flinched away from her, eyes still on the wall. "No."

"Do you _want_ Azula to be Fire Lord?"

He looked at her, then, a quick glance from the corner of his good eye. "Of course I don't."

"Then come back."

"I will. I'll help Aang defeat-"

"Who?"

"The Avatar. His name is Aang."

Mai closed her eyes for the moment it took to shore up her composure. "I don't care what his name is," she said, her voice perfectly even. "I don't care about him. I don't want to hear about him. I care about you, and I care about our country, and I care about you doing the one fucking thing you were born to do."

Zuko turned the rest of the way toward her. "I'll help Aang defeat the Fire Lord," he said again. "And then I'll end this war. And then I'll try and make things right again. Like they're supposed to be."

She laughed, a short a bitter sound. "The Avatar couldn't even hold Ba Sing Se. You can't honestly believe that-"

"I do," said Zuko, and she knew that he meant it. Knew, yet found no comfort in the certainty.

She held his gaze, searching his eyes for some way to change his mind. There was none, and she rested her forehead against his shoulder, her hand splayed on his chest. "I guess you believe a lot of stupid things," she said.

"I do," he agreed. She felt his fingers against the back of her neck, smoothing the small, soft hairs beneath her bun. "Like that you might still want to be with me, after all this is over."

When she was this close she could smell his sweat, achingly familiar under the prison's stink of smoke and sulfur. She turned her head, pressing her lips to the pulse that fluttered in his neck. "You're such an idiot," she whispered.

The hand on her neck began to wander, fingertips tracing the curve of her ear; the other settled at the small of her back. "I've missed you so much," he said. "It feels like it's been months. Years."

"It's been two weeks," she said.

"Thirteen days."

Mai chuckled a little against his skin. "How many hours?"

Zuko kissed her forehead. "Too many."

Faint voices and the clang of boots on metal walkways drifted through the small, barred window in the door. Mai thought of the guard waiting just outside that door, one loud noise away from bursting in and catching them like this. She imagined how it would look, the warden's niece dallying with a prisoner in the shadows, and somehow thinking about it in such bald terms only heightened her awareness of where she was and what she was doing.

They'd spent months in each other's company, enjoying the luxuries of courtly life as summer drifted by. She knew him as she knew herself, as she knew the daggers strapped to her limbs and the pale skin beneath them. She'd spent long hours tracing his outline with her fingers, nails gently grazing the dips and swells of his stomach, the hollows of his elbows, the delicate bones of his hands. How many times had she watched him stretch out on her bed, comfortably naked against the silk sheets?

Yet now, as she stood in the circle of his arms, she was acutely aware of his body, his flat, firm chest and the scent of his arousal, musky and masculine. She could feel his heart pound against the breastbone under her palm. Her own pulse quickened as she kissed him, his upper lip rough with stubble and his mouth tasting of blood.

He moaned softly, a low hum she felt more than heard, and as he pulled her closer she felt a hard, insistent heat against her hip. Her breath caught, the sound of his loud and rough in her ear. And for a sudden, wrenching moment she was swept back to the palace of Ba Sing Se, to those first nights spent in the arms of an old friend wearing a stranger's face, desperate for each other's skin as they fumbled in the dark.

"Mai." The single word, spoken in a gravelly whisper she'd lain awake remembering, was the permission she hadn't realized she needed. He gasped as her hand closed around him through the rough cloth of his uniform. Their eyes met, his wide, yellow gaze asking a question that she answered with a hand slid under his clothes.

He peeled away layers of cloth with the precision of experience, removing only what he needed to, his hands Firebender warm against the inside of her thigh. He lifted her easily, held her in the open air with her ankles crossed behind his back and her arms around his neck.

Mai shut her eyes against the cell, the prison, the boiling lake, the zeppelin that had carried her there and Azula's cold smile as she described what she would do to her brother. But even as she shut them out, Mai saw plainly the decision she would have to make. The details were uncertain, but she knew. And as soon as she knew, she'd decided.

Afterward, he held her close for a very long time, still buried deep inside her with his lips against her throat. "I love you," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."

She clenched her jaw until the urge to beg had passed. "I love you, too," she said, for the fourth time in the years of her life she could remember.

Neither of them spoke as they dressed. There was nothing else to say.

oOoOo


End file.
